Les Paul Style Pre-Wired Instructions

Instructions

So many guitarists tell me that they rarely use their volume or tone controls. I think that's mostly because the components don't have a useful taper - you know, that ON/OFF type taper. This pre-wired harness for your Les Paul style guitar is an awesome easy way to improve your guitar's response to use of the controls - both volume and tone.

1. - Give your harness a dry fit and make sure that everything fits as it should. If you are replacing your toggle switch make sure that it feeds through the channels easily. Some early Epiphone and other import guitars are simply drilled as opposed to routed and they can be tight for this vintage style toggle. Additionally you may need to enlarge your potentiometer mounting holes to 3/8".

2. - (If you are not replacing your toggle switch and jack skip down to Step #3.) With your control and pickup cavities empty, install your Pre-Wired Toggle Switch by feeding the leads into the back of your toggle switch cavity, through your pickup routes, and into your control cavity. Your leads are color coded with a small amount of heat shrink tubing. Red goes to Bridge Volume Output, Yellow to Neck Volume Output, and the Bare (Longest) is the output and goes to the jack.

2.1 - Your jack will have two separate lugs; one for the hot signal that goes to the tip of the jack and one for ground that goes to the sleeve of the jack. Slide your included heat shrink over the output lead - DO NOT SHRINK IT YET.

2.2 - Cut your output lead to proper length and prep it to connect to the output jack. The inner stranded wire will be soldered to the tip lug and braided outer shield will be soldered to the sleeve lug.

2.3 - Once you've soldered the outer braid to the sleeve lug slide the heat shrink close the the jack - you want to eliminate the possibility of the jack tip coming in contact with the outer braid and causing a short.

2.4 - Leave the wired jack through the jack mounting hole. It can sometimes be difficult in install it if the potentiometers have been installed.

3. - Install you pickups and make note of which lead is which when the come out in the control cavity. Nothing worse than having backwards controls.

4. - Next install your Volume/Tone Control Assembly and mount it to the body with the included hardware (lock washer, dress washer, and nut).

4.1 - Locate your bridge ground - often referred to as a chassis ground - THIS IS NOT THE SIGNAL GROUND FROM YOUR BRIDGE PICKUP. This should be a solid core wire (usually 18-20 AWG) that is connected to your stop bar post.

4.2 - Solder this ground wire to the back of one of your pots to ground your tuners, strings, bridge, and stop bar. This prevents the frequencies getting picked up by your metal hardware from getting mixed in with your signal.

5. - Connect your pickup leads to the corresponding volume control.

5.1 - Identify the Signal "Hot" wire for your neck pickup and solder it to Lug #3 (the lower lug shown in the picture above). It's important to understand what type of lead your pickups have (Vintage or Modern).

5.2 - Identify the Signal "Ground" wire (may be braided outer shield on vintage style pickups) and solder it to the back of the neck volume pot.

6.1 - Locate your toggle switch neck lead (If you purchased one of mine with your kit it will be coded with yellow heat shrink. Remove the heat skrink, prep the lead by cutting it to length and pushing back the outer braided shield, while leaving much of the cloth insulation exposed.